Surprise!

Matthew 24:36-44

I’m not really a fan of surprises. 

Even when the actual thing that surprises me is good – a delightful present, an experience I truly enjoy, cookies – I just…don’t like feeling unprepared. 

(As a kid, I made lists for Santa Claus for a reason.)

 

Some of you may genuinely enjoy surprises, especially under the Christmas tree. I kind of envy you. 

But I know I’m not alone in preferring to know what’s coming, what’s going to happen.

Especially when it’s important.

 

Jesus’ early disciples definitely wanted to know about the important things coming their way – about the actual way, and the real time, that salvation would come.

And Jesus says no.

No; you can’t know that.

No one can know that.

I don’t even know that.

It’s a surprise!

 

(Oh, come on, Jesus. Can’t you at least leave us the illusion that you’ve got this planned and covered?!)

 

Okay. Deep breath.

Ultimate salvation – the return of the Messiah to settle all the things that are still a mess, to bring all of God’s peace, justice, glory and love into full reality among us – is going to be a surprise.

 

A good surprise (Right, Jesus??!)

But definitely a surprise.

Jesus tells his disciples, tells us, that it’s going to happen when we are busy doing something else. We’ll be in the middle of our ordinary days – up to our eyeballs in email or getting through the to-do list or driving somewhere – and it’ll just happen. Dramatic and disruptive and glorious and shocking. 

And whether that surprise is joyfully or catastrophically disruptive depends on how we prepare. How we are staying ready. 

 

Every year in the church, about this time, we start talking about “being ready”. It’s the theme of the season of Advent, the season of preparation for the coming of God. 

The coming of God we already know about, in the story handed down to us of a baby born in Bethlehem. And the coming we’re anticipating, the eventual glorious return of the Christ to complete and heal and resolve everything, once for all. 

It’s a lot of preparation, for the known and the unknown, all at once.

 

It’s also a time when the preparation and readiness demands of the world around us may be ramping up.  We’re supposed to be preparing for the celebrations of Christmas, to be ready with the perfect surprises of gifts for (and from) those we love – and to prepare for all the things we know will happen: travel or family gatherings or church pageants or work “holiday” events and year-end deadlines.

 

There’s a lot to be ready for.

Including, Jesus insists, the very real possibility that that final coming of God that ends our sense of time and changes everything could happen right now!

Surprise!

 

So be ready.

No one knows when. 

 

My shoulders – already a little tight from searching the internet for perfect Christmas surprises for my family – are twitching as I think about it.  Are you sure you couldn’t schedule this, Jesus? Really sure we have to be on watch now?

 

Because constant watchfulness – this knowing something could happen and being ready to respond all the time – consumes energy and attention, wears down your body and your spirit.

 

In many cases, it’s a trauma response, readiness and vigilance as a repeating echo of fear and loss and shock that spins constant adrenaline in a belated effort to keep yourself safe.

 

And that… well, that doesn’t actually sound like what Jesus would be teaching us to do.

In fact, he might be insisting it’s all going to come as a surprise so we don’t tie ourselves into knots of tense, protective awareness, all set to catch the moment before it catches us. 
So that we wait, we prepare, differently.

 

As he’s been telling his disciples how the unexpected and disruptive coming of God will unfold, I noticed he’s been warning us not to respond to all the alarms, to the misleading alerts, that are on their way. We are not to jump up and respond every time someone says “Here’s the Messiah! Go there! Come here!” The coming we are waiting for will be everywhere, and in all things – not something we have to race after or we’ll miss it.

 

You and I are to be fully in the moment and place where we are, and be ready for the fullness of God to come to us, to everything, to everywhere, completely.

In the moment and ready everywhere and anywhen, because the most unlikely times and places – the dentist’s office, the evening news – could be suddenly full of the glory and power and justice and love of God.

 

To be ready in this way means to be always doing what we want God to find us doing, to be always where we want God to meet us, to be actively expecting love, justice, glory, and healing any time, any moment, anywhere.

 

To be prepared, in this way, means to arrange our lives, hearts, and minds for transformation. To practice a readiness to accept love that shows up unexpectedly, to share and rejoice in love that comes to us in disruptive ways. To be ready, even waiting eagerly, for God to open our hearts unexpectedly to deep, powerful, generous connection with a stranger or an adversary. 

Or to someone so familiar we forget we could love them.

 

We’re to be ready for those surprise loves to turn our lives upside down, instead of trying to manage and limit the ways that we open our hearts so it doesn’t disrupt our lives. 

 

We’re to set up our everyday lives so that God’s justice and mercy flow through us and lift us when it floods over the world; so that we’re ready to forgive and be forgiven in ways that change the course of our lives – instead of bracing against change, against reconciliation with those we’ve hurt, as if it’s a tidal wave we can’t survive.

 

That kind of readiness means we are living receptive and open, in welcoming expectation of God’s glory, justice, love and presence every when and every where.

It’s the exact opposite of the hyper-vigilance that comes from, and anticipates, trauma and anxiety. 

 

That serene openness doesn’t come naturally when we’re talking about wars and earthquakes and meteors and social upheaval, as Jesus has been doing. 

Or at least, it doesn’t come naturally unless you already trust Jesus, already know you can fall unprotected into God’s disruptive justice and glory and find healing, strength, hope and love.

That trust that Jesus came to teach us all the first time.

 

That’s why we prepare, this coming month, to feel our hearts broken open with love and tender care for a baby awkwardly, disruptively, unexpectedly born in Bethlehem, trailing glory and power and healing into a world not at all ready and thoroughly surprised by it. 

 

Because preparing our hearts to love unexpectedly, to be washed in healing and glory we can’t see coming, is how we stop needing to know just when it’s going to happen. 

It’s how we prepare to love surprises.

 

And preparing our hearts to be changed at any moment by reconciliation and peace, 

learning to expect unpredictable wonders to show up in our everyday lives anywhere and everywhere, 

is how we live ready, live prepared for the always-surprising, disruptive, extraordinary wonder of the coming of the fullness of God.

You Will Survive

Luke 21:5-19

For a decade or two I’ve had a plan for the zombie apocalypse – or other catastrophic, civilization-destroying end of the world situation.

I have several friends who have well-developed survival skills and supplies, and think about disaster prep with some regularity. After listening carefully to their plans and advice, I developed my own.

 

In the case of Zombie Apocalypse, eat me first. 

While I still have some useful meat on my bones.

 

While my plan isn’t really an option for someone raising kids, or providing primary care for a loved one – or many others – I think it would work for me.

I am not a fan of roughing it, which there will be a lot of when the world ends.  And I’m not especially afraid of death – I know it’s not the end of the story. So in the collapse of civilization, I’d like my death to be useful to my community.

 

Mostly, I think this seems like a faithful plan – laying down my life for my friends, even. But this week, I’m starting to wonder if Jesus himself would agree that my “die early, serve the community” plan is the right one.

 

We just heard him predicting the end of civilization as his contemporaries know it. The end of the world as we know it. Earthquakes and wars and insurrections and famines and plagues and false leaders and disasters in the heavens. 

Everything – everything is going to be falling apart.

And the disaster won’t be just general, but personal, too. 

We – the folks Jesus is talking to – will personally experience arrest and betrayal and killings.

 

So “Do not be terrified,” he says. “Not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

 

Not a hair of your head – my head, your head – will perish.

 

What if we knew we were going to survive the end of the world?

 

What if all of civilization, and all the small essential parts of our personal assurance and safety are yanked away, and you knew we were going to survive.

Be here, right in the middle of all of it, all the way through, without losing a single hair. 

 

If not a hair of my head will perish, I … might have to re-think the “eat me first” plan. 

It won’t work.

I’m going to have to take in the whole disaster, the whole collapse, and keep going.

I mean, that’s more alarming than ever, in a lot of ways. I do not expect to like roughing it through the collapse of civilization, no matter how protected my hair and life and soul might be.

But it’s a little exhilarating, too.

 

And it’s full of possibilities.

Knowing the end of the world won’t kill you is like having a superpower. 

You could take on all the zombies in single combat certain that you’d come out alive (and with your brains still in their original container, uneaten).

 

I could protect other people.

I could try things that aren’t guaranteed to succeed.

I wouldn’t have to be afraid.

 

Instead of spending my time on airplanes wondering if my body would be identifiable in the event of a crash, if I knew I was going to survive, I could spend my flying-anxiety energy on imagining the opportunity to help other people – to be the voice of calm, reducing panic, reminding people of the stuff they didn’t listen to in the life-vest briefing, getting people to work together.

(Just imagining it now it feels so good to be able to help, to make a difference.)

 

Or, instead of getting stuck in slow existential fear for myself, my family, and our world when the news is full of stories about extreme weather, famines, and even wars fueled by climate change, I might be motivated to do even more than I think I can. Become more persistent in the little things and big ones.

Instead of feeling a guilty sense of relief that I probably won’t live to see the worst when we hear that the world of natural disasters is going to get much worse unless we change quite a lot, if I knew I was going to survive – live to the days when 100-year-olds are considered bare youths, as Isaiah prophesies – I know I’d have to be more passionate about the actions I can take. More interested in planning how to help others survive.

 

What about you?

 

Maybe I – maybe we – could approach the end of the world as we know it not as something to be avoided at all costs, but as an opportunity – a very uncomfortable one, but an opportunity still – to share our blessings. To count up the gifts we’re grateful for, and give away hope and peace and confidence and joy and calm and opportunity.

 

The world doesn’t end every day. Fortunately!

But every day you and I face anxieties, losses, fears: we experience little bits of the things that could add up to an end of the world.

The anxieties, losses, fears come from the news media; from fractures in our relationships with family members or friends; from disease; from screw-ups at work; from weather; from politics and the stock market and the price of gas – all the things that make us vulnerable, all the things that remind us that we can fail, and that the world can fail us.

 

So what if we knew that not only would we survive the end of the world, but that we – you specifically, me specifically – would survive the layoffs at the office, the collapse of the stock market or housing market, the flood or the fire or the loss of a spouse or an endless plane ride over the dark uncertain ocean?

What if you know you will survive this thing that you fear might break you? (Whatever that thing is for you.)

 

Would you use your protection to protect others? To carry a stranger with a broken leg down the staircase in a burning building? 

To buy a meal for someone else with the last dollar in your wallet? 

To keep speaking of hope and opportunity when everyone in the meeting is predicting disaster and recommending giving up? 

To make promises of generosity and love for the future even when the future looks threatening?  

To pray with joy and confidence and trust – or at least stubborn cranky persistence – in the times when it seems like God isn’t even listening? 

 

Those last two, at least, are what Jesus is telling us not just that we can do, but that we will do, because he will give us words and wisdom for all we need.

 

There’s a story that when asked about what he’d do if the world were going to end tomorrow, 

Martin Luther said “If tomorrow were the Judgment Day, today I would plant an apple tree.”

 

He’d plant the future. Tend fruit even for days that may not come. He’d plant hope, and patience, and care.

What about you?
If you know you’d survive the end of the world,

what would you plant? 

 

Do not be terrified, Jesus tells us. Not a hair of your head will perish. 

You will survive unbroken.

 

It’ll be every possible kind of uncomfortable or frightening or chaotic or intimidating or disruptive or just hard you can imagine, yes, but you won’t even lose a single hair.

 

And by your endurance – by committing to that apple tree of hope, and trust, and patience and love to be shared with others – by your showing up and not giving up, and trusting God for the rest- you will gain your soul. Gain the abundant life, the heart of God within you, that can never be extinguished, or lost, or end.

 

What Makes Saints Saints

Ephesians 1:11-23; Luke 6:20-31

I think Paul is trying to encourage us.

 

Paul (or whoever on Team Paul actually wrote the letter, we’re not sure) is writing “to the saints” – to all the people who’ve come together to live in the Christian faith. He doesn’t know what’s happening in their lives, exactly, but he knows that being able to trust God, experience God’s love and power, and hold our community together is important, and that it can be hard for many of us to do those things – in the Mediterranean nineteen centuries ago, or here and now.

 

So he’s reminding us that we already have God’s promises – the “inheritance” of faith and resurrection and belonging; the presence of the Holy Spirit. And he’s telling us there’s still more:

The power of God working actively for us; active, immediate sharing in God’s glory; our taking part in the same resurrection and heavenly destiny as Jesus are so close, he tells us. So certain. He’s just praying God shows us how certain.

(It’s the first century equivalent of sending a link to the tracking app or site that shows that our long awaited delivery is “On the Way.”)

 

He doesn’t know what’s going on exactly in our lives, in our community. But he wants us to feel what he feels from the knowledge that the absolute love and glory and power of God are there for us: He wants us to feel the joy and confidence and wholeness and deep powerful trust.

 

Because whatever is going on in our lives, better and worse, that joy Paul’s trying to describe in this letter – that abiding, insistent wholeness and trust – is exactly what God wants for us. And Paul insists we will, must, experience it.

 

I was reminded in two separate conversations this week of how long it took me to start to believe that God calls us – commands us – to that joyful wholeness, not to misery or burnout or overwork. That joy and fulfillment – exuberant and forceful or quiet and slow – is what makes saints saints. What makes us holy. 

 

So if you listen to Jesus today, and loving your enemies, “turning the other cheek”, and giving to everyone who asks sounds stressful, and threatening, and miserable, then the one thing I’m sure of is that God doesn’t expect you to do it in the way you’re currently imagining it would work. 

 

If something about putting that enemy-loving, inexhaustible giving, subversively gentle teaching into practice sounds unnerving and uncertain, but kind of exciting, kind of freeing and empowering, well….yes, that particular thing might be exactly what God’s calling you to do.

 

Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, Paul himself – none of these people gave up everything they had and took up work that would scare most of us to death because they expected to earn holiness from God by doing the hardest, most miserable work possible.  They sold all their possessions, emptied the stinkiest of bedpans, preached on street corners because that’s what made them whole, joyful, complete, and strong.

I’m sure each of them also had their moments of weariness and grief, of everything going wrong, too.

Holy doesn’t guarantee easy. 

Joy doesn’t mean ignoring or denying what’s hard for us, or what’s wrong in the world.

 

Because sometimes – maybe even often – the monstrous or irritating, boring or nasty or rotten experiences of the world happen right along with, right around, our joy in God, our wholeness and hope and renewal.  

But what Jesus taught and lived for us, what God dreams for us, what Paul is praying for us, is that our joy-giving sense of being connected with God persists through it all.  

And that persistent connection of joy is what makes saints saints. What makes us holy.

 

What makes it possible for one of us to do one more thing in our daily lives to nurture and protect the earth, when so many news reports suggest we’re in a lot of climate trouble and what you or I do won’t solve it. 

What makes it possible for another of us to re-build every single personal habit of shopping, working, sleeping, speaking in order to bring justice to people who’ve been oppressed for generations, even though it’s obvious one person will never make enough difference. 

What makes it possible to be generous to that particular family member or co-worker who absolutely always tries to push your buttons – and even see the image of God in them, God’s love for them. 

What makes it possible to find genuine, renewing, delight in giving – and giving even more – no matter how frequent the requests for our time, how uncomfortable the close encounter with poverty or need, or how annoying the pledge drive may be.

 

Holiness – wholeness and fulfillment and love and joy – acts at a lot of different magnitudes. Some holiness is as inescapable as an earthquake. Some holiness – in your friends, family, neighbors or self – you might not actually notice, unless you’re looking. 

 

Today’s the Sunday on the calendar every year when we pause to think about saints. About people who are particularly good models of living in the hope and faith and trust and joy of God. Who have enough extra of that fulfillment and wholeness and love and elation that others can experience it through them. 

 

And we pay attention to those saints because God doesn’t want that wholeness and love and elation and power to be reserved for just some of us.  God wants to kindle and plant that in all of us. 

 

Paul insists that God wants you and me to experience that joyful sense of being blessed: being beloved and gifted and hope-filled and overflowing with fulfillment and wonder at God’s presence. That sense of blessing is what helps us notice and use our God-given power to love and pray for our enemies, to return peace for violence and generosity for greed, as Jesus teaches. That’s what makes saints saints. That’s what makes us holy.

 

I want that. 

And I find it here: that sense of blessing, of belovedness, hope, wonder and fulfillment. 

I’ve been overwhelmed by that sense of love and wholeness as I listen to members of our congregation count up our blessings while we think about our annual giving. Filled up enough with that sense of wholeness recently that nothing the assorted malfunctioning office software and exhausting to-do list and election-anxiety-pushing news media can do can wipe out my joy, even though I’m just as annoyed by those things as ever.

 

And I want to invest in that. I want to give to joy, everywhere and every time I can. I can’t buy happiness, but I can spend joy – invest both money and heart in this community that nurtures and shares blessings and hope and love. So I try to spend more joy each year.

And it’s working for me, too. Every single dollar and dime and thousand I pledge and give to the celebration of our wholeness and the sharing of our blessings returns twice as much in joy.

 

Paul’s writing to encourage us today. Encourage us to be confident in that unbreakable fulfillment and joy – no matter who we are, or when, or what’s going on around us. He’s praying that for us; and I’m praying that for you, today. That “with the eyes of our hearts enlightened,” you and I will share with Paul the confident hope, the rich fellowship, the power to transform the world and our own hearts, the absolute wholeness and love and quiet, strong, exuberant joy day after day after day that makes saints saints. That makes us holy.

Now and always.